


Doubt that the sun doth move

by heylifeitsemily



Series: Across Dimensions [3]
Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Angst, Childhood Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Shakespeare, lil bit of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 08:31:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7927885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heylifeitsemily/pseuds/heylifeitsemily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Growing up together, but not growing old.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doubt that the sun doth move

_Faster, faster. Gotta go faster. Go. Go. Go!_

He zigs left and then zags back right, vaulting a bench and winding his way back around a tree. His pursuer cuts him off, reaching out to grab him, but he dodges the hand at the last second.

“Too slow!” He grins as he breaks off into a sprint, looking back over his shoulder to gloat. “That was pathetic even for you, Jenkins!”

“Rick – ” Jenkins starts, chasing after him.

He skirts left, “eat my fucking dust!”

“Rick! Watch – “

Rick doesn’t hear the rest, colliding with something soft and squishy and sending both of them tumbling to the ground. He feels something move against his chest, and after a moment of thought he realizes its someone attempting to speak, words muffled in the cotton of his shirt.

He grunts as they shove him off roughly. He lands on his back and winces at the sunlight in his eyes, shielding himself from it with the back of his hand. It takes a couple of seconds to adjust, and above him, arms crossed, stands a girl with a halo of golden light around her head.

If he believed any of the crap Sunday school had been shoving down his throat, he might’ve thought he was looking at an angel. Or he would have until he got a closer look. Granted, he’s not sure on the specifics, but he knows angels aren’t supposed to scowl or spit their words at him with that much disdain.

“You impetuous, ill-behaved, _vile_ – “

“Oh, _someone_ found their mom’s thesaurus. What else you got, Shakespeare?”

“You scullion, you rampallian, you fustilarian. I’ll tickle your catastrophe,” she growls at him. “Henry IV, act 2, scene 1, line 49.”

“Is that weak shit the best you can do?” he asks, sitting up and dusting off his shirt.

“Thou art the son and heir of a mongrel bitch,” she says, furrowing her brows at him. “King Lear, act 2, scene 2 – “

“Yeah, I just realized I don’t care. At all.”

He stands and finds that he towers over her by nearly a foot, yet she stands her ground, maintaining a constant glower as he moves. Her lip juts out in a contemptuous pout, eyes narrowed whilst she takes in his untucked shirt and shaggy blonde hair. He feels a compulsion to run his hands through it, to make it less aesthetically appalling for some reason, but it’s an impulse easily ignored.

Seeing how little her evil eye is affecting him, her face softens – still communicating complete and utter disapproval, but lessening the aura of a temper tantrum.

“The least you can do is apologize, you know,” she says, almost as if she’s trying to reason with him.

He shrugs. “Pretty sure the least I can do is to walk away.” He turns to do so, but is stopped by a small hand on his shoulder.

“You could,” she intones, “but Mr. Walker just came outside. And all I have to do is burst into tears to get you stuck inside for recess for a week.”

He frowns, looking over his shoulder at her.

“But we wouldn’t want that,” she continues, raising her eyebrow at him.

“You bitch,” he hisses.

“That didn’t sound like an apology,” she singsongs.

He pinches his eyes shut, and turns around to face her. Teeth clenched, he grinds out, “I. Am. _Sorry_.”

Her responding smile is entirely genuine, mischief in her eyes as she extends her hand and introduces herself.

He doesn’t shake it, and she waits patiently for him, glancing at Mr. Walker again before meeting his eyes.

He grips her hand with as much force as a scrawny 8-year-old can muster, satisfied with her slight wince.

“Rick Sanchez.”

“Lovely to meet you,” she simpers with a toothy grin.

Jenkins hovers behind him, eyes wide at the apparent subjugation of _the_ Rick Sanchez. Neither of them move from their stalemate, and he takes it as his opportunity, his index finger poking Rick’s shoulder gently.

“Tag,” he mutters. “You’re it.”

* * *

Grade 8 was one huge shit show and a complete and utter waste of his time, but despite the idiotic teachers and the inane prattling of everyone else in his ‘peer group’, Rick couldn’t help the giddiness he felt at the prospect of the science fair. He’d still have to sit through the inspection of the underqualified idiots the school designates to judge, and what he had planned was so far above their heads that he knew they’d dismiss him without a second thought. But that didn't matter either, since coming home with a medal might stop his dad from beating him up when he got home from school, but the reprieve would last a day, maybe two tops, and then he’d find another reason to resent Rick. And proceed to show that resentment. With his fists.

Fuck that noise.

The schematic in front of him was covered in scrawled notes and smudged lead marks, the paper crumpled and worn from having been erased so many times. The pencil tucked behind his ear pokes him in the face as he cocks his head, the wall behind him pushing it further into his cheek. He notices it vaguely, touches the dent it makes in his mouth with his tongue, relishing a bit in the sting he feels when the two pressures cause the point to break skin.

“Whatcha got there?”

Pencil-based masochism forgotten, he looks up to see her standing a few feet away from him, just outside of the shade he’d been sitting in.

“Things your feeble mind will never be able to comprehend,” he retorts, but it’s acrider than the nonchalance he was going for. The same song and dance of shared insults had become a sort of routine for the two of them, and he couldn’t pinpoint why it felt different this time.

She notices.

“Who pissed in your wheaties?” She settles down next to him, crossing her legs. Instinctively he folds and crumples the paper to hide it from her gaze, which of course only draws more attention to it.

“Oh c’mon, Sanchez,” she drawls, rolling her eyes at him. “Since when do you not take every opportunity to broadcast your,” she pauses, scrunching her nose, “ _insurmountable_ intelligence to the world?”

He doesn’t respond, busy trying to quell the rush of heat that comes to his cheeks. His fists clench with enough force to put small tears in the paper.

He doesn’t know why he can’t show her.

He can’t remember the last time he was in the dark over something, when he wasn’t entirely aware, if not in control of a situation. He stares at the asphalt in front of him and does his best to school his face into something impassive. Indifferent.

Sensing the change in atmosphere, she scoots a couple of inches away, looking out at the empty playground. She twiddles her thumbs and sneaks a glance at him to find him still looking blankly at the ground. A moment passes, and if he sees her looking at him, he does not acknowledge it.

It’s jarring – sometimes he goes into these funks, unresponsive bouts while he puzzles something out – but this is different. It’s some sort of practiced apathy; she knows by the occasional twitch of his jaw, and the way his fingers still grip the page desperately.

She looks at the playground again. Despite the lack of children, one of the swings is moving back and forth in an eerie, Steven King way that makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Deciding it’s an appropriately diffusing topic, she opens her mouth to speak.

She’s cut off by his rapid-fire speech.

“The schematics on this page are so beyond your sphere of understanding that spending any time explaining it to you would be a degree of ineffectual which, coincidentally, is also beyond your sphere of understanding, since you’ve never had to sit through a lifetime’s worth of meaningless lectures given by the dumbasses the education system spits out at the end of their thousands of dollars’ worth of schooling. It’s physically impossible for you or any version of you to even _begin_ to know the fundamental concepts at the basis of my work, and I’m not – “

“Any version of me?” she interjects.

He sputters at having been interrupted, turning to glare at her. “Yeah, and – “

“Explain that to me.”

His glare melts into something of confusion, in that he’s perplexed by how dense one person can be despite having been surrounded by shining examples of stupidity since he stepped foot into a classroom. “Were you not listening to anything I just said?”

She shrugs, leaning her head back against the wall. “Tell me anyway.”

He watches her for a moment, eyes darting away when she glances over at him, waiting.

Slowly, he relaxes his hands, smoothing out the page in his lap. He can’t help looking over at her again, checking her face for any signs that she’s making fun of him. It’s almost more disorienting when he finds none.

With a deep breath, he launches into a spiel about the Many Worlds Interpretation and the applications of quantum tunnelling. She snickers when he says “portal gun”, and he turns, ready with a venomous quip, but she waves it off, smiling good-naturedly as she gestures for him to continue.

He does, reluctantly at first, and then he falls into it again. He goes on for what could be minutes or hours before a car pulls up to the curb, honking once and interrupting him mid-sentence. She looks equally affronted by it, and he feels that vindictive kind of validation you only get from having your annoyance corroborated by another person.

“That’s my mom,” she says, standing up. “We’ll finish this tomorrow?” 

“Sure, whatever,” he shrugs, looking down again.

If her parents start picking her up later and later in the coming weeks, he doesn’t mention it.

* * *

She glares at his black eye with an alarming fervency, as though staring at will heal the purple and blue skin faster. She’s smart enough to know who gave it to him without him spelling it out for her.

The bell goes, and in the break between first and second period she grabs his arm and drags him out to the yard, plants her feet firmly on the ground, and looks up at him.

Or, at his eye, again.

He’s about to snap at her when she reaches out, leaving feather-light touches with her fingertips along the murky edges of the bruise. He flinches, but she simply moves in closer to touch him. She looks thoughtful more than pitiful, and it’s the only reason he doesn’t slap her hand away.

She retracts her hand after another moment, folding her arms over her chest.

“Satisfied?” He deadpans.

“Not until the son of a bitch is six feet under,” she responds. The bluntness of it takes him by surprise, and though he knows that with her delicate sensibilities she would never _actually_ do it, he appreciates it all the same.

The bell goes again and she grabs his hand, tugging him along.

* * *

“Skipping class again, Sanchez?”

He glances up from where he was creeping across the lawn to see her perched on the roof of the school, legs dangling off the side. Her feet swing back and forth in a steady pattern, sun behind her casting shadows of the motion on the grass below.

“I can think of at least six better ways to waste my time,” he says, “care to join me?”

Surprise flashes across her face, but it’s soon replaced by a mocking contemplation.

“I’ve got a spare,” she responds impartially. “Be down in a sec.”

She disappears from the edge of the roof and into the building, strolling out the back door half a minute later. She jogs towards him and then slows, the two of them walking away from the establishment in sync.

“What’s the plan, exactly?”

“Steal an indeterminate amount of beer, hijack a vehicle, drive up to the lake and enjoy ourselves by whatever means necessary.” He peeks down at her, smiling at the uncertainty on her face.  
  
Rick is pleasantly surprised when it turns to a roguish albeit hesitant grin.

“Nice of you to get that stick out of your ass,” he comments.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once,” she says, turning the full beam of her smile towards him. “Julius Caesar.”

He raises an unimpressed eyebrow.

She keeps smiling.

* * *

Three crates of beer sit between them, their backs pressed against a large redwood, shoulder to shoulder. The sun sets over the lake, patches of light dispersed and glittering across the water.

She sighs.

He snorts.

“I’m _content_ ,” she defends, leaning her head back to give him a half-assed glare.

“With what? The mosquito bites or the daily reminder of our own mortality and – the inevitable passage of time?” he says, taking another swig.

“Hey, as much as I dig your casual nihilism, and believe me Sanchez, I do, would it kill you to feel something for once?”

She sounds annoyed at his trademark killjoy attitude, but there’s something akin to pity in it that makes his eyes roll. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the reason I violently repress any and all feelings is because their entirely out of conscious control. I can’t just fucking – force myself to feel things, unless you want to pull out the surgical pins and get real fr – real freaky with my thalamus.”

She laughs incredulously, a full, throaty sound that he’s not sure if he’s ever heard before. Her derisive snorts and unimpressed scoffs – he’s lived with those for 9 years and can do an appropriately condescending imitation of each when needed.

But this, he can’t come up with an adequate word to describe the difference. Rick dealt with clearly defined facts and principles sprinkled with a due amount of profanities, and generally left the romanticized diction and flowery prose to her.

It’s lighter, maybe. It heightens the pleasant buzz of alcohol in his veins, makes him feel floaty, makes him wonder how they got here from a shouting match as kids.

It – it sounds like she’s genuinely happy.

He doesn’t know what to do with that information.

She slouches, leaning so that her temple rests on the curve of his shoulder, gaze still pointed at the lake. He stiffens in response and she’s either too tactful or too drunk to notice, raising her beer in front of her. She speaks with a tone of finality.

“To mortality.”

“Why the fuck would I toast to that?”

“Because, fuck, I don’t know,” she rambles, flailing her free hand, “having an end means you have to make the most of the middle or some shit.”

“That’s some real articulate bullshit right there,” he snarks.

“Okay, what about,” she pauses, her hand coming to rest just above his knee, “what about something horribly depressing and pessimistic?”

“Knowing you, that just – that just means _realistic_.”

She lets out a huff and pushes herself up into a kneeling position, leaning back on her heels. Her beer is raised triumphantly in front of her, hair a mess of stray pieces and framing a face painted with drunken bravado. The sun is just nearly setting behind her, the sunlight playing off those vagrant strands so that she almost seems aglow.

“Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death, and death will have his day,” she recites, leaning the mouth of her beer towards him.

“I’ll drink to that,” he says, a clink sounding as the bottle necks collide.

* * *

He’s disgusted by the starry-eyed cliché of it, but kissing her seems as easy as breathing, even in the humid air of a forest with a swarm of bugs flittering around them.

His lips trail down her neck leaving angry, red marks in their wake. One of her hands presses between his shoulder blades, pulling him closer, the other tangling in his hair.

“Christ, Sanchez, I – “

“Rick,” he interrupts, biting down near her collar bone to enforce the point.

She lets out a breathless laugh but quickly takes the note to heart, repeating his name like a mantra.

* * *

He narrowly dodges a pillow thrown at his head, but the subsequent one aimed at his gut hits its mark with surprising impetus.

“You’re an asshole,” she says, in a sort of resigned sigh that tells him she’s frustrated rather than furious.

“Let me get this straight. You’re the one paying exorbitant amounts of cash to live halfway across the country to be part of the next batch of mindless drones that the current batch will instill with mindlessness, and _I’m_ the asshole?”

“Yes!” She exclaims, throwing another shirt into her suitcase. “You have always been the asshole in this relationship. What makes you think that’s changed?”

“I’m not the one leaving,” he responds, and it’s in the deadpan sort of way that he explains any concept he finds agonizingly simple.

She marches over to him, prodding a finger at his chest.

“No, but I’m pursuing an opportunity, and I’m doing what makes me happy, and you can’t admit to yourself that you’re going to _miss me_ ,” she accentuates it by poking him again, twice. “And you’re making me into the bad guy!”

She’s wrong. His stomach flips and his fists clench and his legs go numb because _she’s wrong._

He exits her bedroom and storms down her stairs without looking back, slamming the front door behind him on his way out. He hears her window open as he gets into his car, but he refuses to look up.

“Sanchez!”

He puts the key in the ignition.

“Rick, you know I’m going to miss you too.”

She’s shouting it from her window out into the open street, for all the world to hear, and she says it as though it’s a fact. Something she wholeheartedly knows to be true, and so commonplace in her life that stating it doesn’t faze her.

He drives.

* * *

He doesn’t miss her.

* * *

All of two weeks pass before Rick is making the too long and too expensive drive to see her. The university buildings are grandiose and pretentious, the people more so, but he doesn’t have to interact with too many of them before knocking on her door.

There’s grumbling, the sound of footsteps, a pause, and the door swings open. She stands in little more than pajamas, hair messy from sleep.

“Rick?” she asks, rubbing her eyes. “It’s three in the morning.”

“Yeah, don’t get to caught up in those studies of yours just yet. I’m here because I thought it would be polite to tell you we’re going out tomorrow.”

“We’re – we’re what?”

“I’m taking you on an adventure. A real one, with space and danger and murder, just so you realize how small and insignificant our lives are in the expanse of the universe.”

“Murder?” she questions, still half-asleep. “Is this your idea of a date?”

“Thought you’d appreciate the notice,” he says before turning away, leaving her standing in her doorway, still unsure whether she was awake or asleep.

* * *

He returns five hours later and only marginally more well-rested than her, and without much thought grabs her hand and drags her out to the car.

She stays silent, strapping herself in and crossing her arms. She raises an eyebrow as he situates in the driver’s seat, adjusting his mirrors.

And then he takes off.

She screams. For about a full minute, well into their ascent through the atmosphere. Once they escape Earth’s gravity she stops, but then pulls her knees up to her chest slowly, almost as if to start rocking back and forth.

Instead, she just mutters “ _holy shit, Rick_ ” and stares out into space, reaching out to press her fingertips to the ship’s windshield. There’s blues and oranges and blinding whites, and from his spot he can see it reflected in her pupils and the irises of her eyes.

* * *

They learned a while ago that going out to see movies wasn’t a viable option for a date, since she makes little comments and he makes loud, sarcastic cuts at the films as a whole. Dinner made for overpriced meals and a taxing compliance with pointless social customs that he had no patience for. There were no beaches nearby for long, romantic walks, nor were either of them interested in roller blading or sock hops.

So, more often than not, they go into space.

They explore new worlds and meet with new species, and she provides the appropriate distraction for him to get whatever they need for his latest project.

It’s fun and reckless and no one gets hurt, until one day her arm is practically slashed to pieces and the scent of blood nearly makes her vomit. He tells her not to overreact, and she’s lost enough blood to not notice the way his hands shake when he patches her up. She murmurs what he recognizes as the soliloquy from Hamlet as he tends to the wound, ignoring her sharp intakes of breath.

“ _And makes us rather bear those ills we have_ _than fly to others that we know not of?_ _Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.”_

“Marry me,” he says.

“What?”

“Marry me,” he repeats, slower this time.

She furrows her brow, turning her head to look at him. “Rick, are you seriously asking me – “

“Do you want me to get down on one knee or something?” he asks, turning to put the medical supplies away. “Because I thought the sentiment was more important than the aesthetic part.”

“I can’t believe you.”

“Is that a yes?” He says, kneeling over her once again. They both sit in a pool of her blood, pungent enough that he can taste it when he inhales.

Her head falls back onto the ship’s metal floor, cool yet slick beneath her.

“Yes.”

* * *

Beth is born while he’s off planet. She has his hair and his eyes, but her nose. He can tell by the way she cries when her mother puts on Mozart that she’s going to inherit his shrewdness too.

* * *

He struggles to put a name to her newfound caution and contemplation in the face of their recent travels, when Beth had been handed off to her non-drunk, non-abusive grandparents. Contrary to popular belief, he possessed his own moral compass; it just usually aligned with hers. Thus, it surprises him, one day, when she refuses a job on the basis of thievery being wrong in principle.

He calls her a hypocrite, and she admits it in stride whilst adamantly refusing to help.

Later, on the trip back home as she snores from the passenger seat, Rick comes to a horrible realization.

She’s developing a righteous streak.

* * *

“I’m too busy,” she says.

He hears it and variations of it more and more as time passes, when Beth and her job grow to be a priority over their escapades. As far as she's concerned, that time was behind them – it _had_ to be behind them. They have responsibilities, and she needs his help managing them.

So he learns to sneak out in the evenings when she falls asleep in Beth’s room, and spends nights tinkering in the garage. He learns to work without her again.

He tells himself it doesn’t matter when he floats into the driveway in the early hours of the morning and sees her standing on the porch. He steels himself for a fight, but when he comes to stand in front of her he’s met only with a silent raised eyebrow.

She gives him a quick once-over, frowning at the red on his lab coat.

* * *

She grows weary of him, as the silver of her wedding band dulls around her ring finger, and her daughter takes up more and more of the couch when she falls asleep waiting for him to come home.

The red on his lab coat never seems to wane no matter how many times she hands it back to him clean, and the flask comes out more and more with each venture he goes out on.

She yells at him, about ignoring his family for cheap thrills and unnecessarily putting himself in danger because he’s a glorified adrenaline junkie. Parading it as anything else, like a desire for scientific exploration and the like, seems to piss her off even more.

He starts washing his lab coat at the laundromat. Reminds himself that they’re two irrelevant specks of dust in the macro lens of the universe, just like everyone else.

* * *

Beth is at his in-laws when the transmission comes in, Birdperson looking for Rick and finding her instead. She offers to take a message, quickly grows very invested, and an hour later bids Birdperson farewell while fighting back tears.

She stands in the walkway in front of the door as he opens it, and without hesitation she speaks, voice clear and calm.

“So you’re a war criminal now, huh.”

He pulls the flask out of his coat and takes a swig, wiping spit off his chin.

“Yeah, planetary geno – genocide will get you a title like that.”

She blanks at that, staring in shock as he moves casually past her into the kitchen, nonchalance – real, honest nonchalance – radiating off of him. He sits down at the stool by the counter, pulls a screwdriver and his latest experiment out of his pocket, and starts to fiddle.

She follows him after a few moments, standing on the other side of the counter and watching him work.

He feels her watching him, and when he looks up, prepared to meet her scorn with equal ardency, he freezes.

Fear.

In the course of knowing each for thirty odd years, he had experienced and promptly memorized every possible expression her face could formulate. He’d seen the entire emotional spectrum reflected in her eyes and her posture and the set of her jaw, but now, she stands before him an entirely different person.

Not just someone who has grown up, grown apart from him.

Someone who’s afraid of him.

She opens her mouth slowly, carefully choosing her words. There’s a tension in her shoulders, like she’s ready to spring away at any moment, her fight or flight instincts battling it out internally.

“I think you should go.” It’s quiet, not much above a whisper.

His expression doesn’t change as he stands up and tucks his things back into his coat. The signature indifference is present in every gesture, and he hopes she doesn’t notice that he can’t meet her eyes.

“Yeah, well don’t start thinking you’re smart enough to have original ideas. I’ve been planning on getting out of this place for weeks now.”

He’s walking towards the door as he says it, and some small, insignificant part of him is waiting for her to call out to him, and admit she was wrong.

She doesn’t.

So, Rick falls back on his usual plan when things go wrong.

He walks away.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading and I hope you liked it! Please leave any and all feedback. And also if you see mistakes, point them out because I just wrote this all at once without editing it.


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